The subject matter described and/or illustrated herein relates generally to electrical connectors, and, more particularly, to electrical connectors having keying features for providing discriminating access to the connector.
It may be desirable to limit user access in data networks for security or other purposes. Specifically, it is becoming more popular to provide buildings with a plurality of data networks, in which each network typically corresponds to a different group of authorized users. With this new development comes the need to restrict access to a particular data network to just a particular group of authorized users. While restrictions have often been achieved in the past using software approaches, such as passwords, physical barriers are beginning to be used to restrict access to networks. Specifically, some connectors are provided with mechanical keying features such that only mating connectors that include complementary keying features can be mated with the connector. For example, a connector may include one or more extensions that are received within corresponding slots within the mating connector, and/or may include one or more slots that receive corresponding extensions of the mating connector. The size, shape, location, and/or the like of the keying features can be varied for different connectors to provide a variety of different possible configurations of keying features. Different configurations of keying features can be used for different networks to limit access of each different network to a different group of authorized users. However, because the size of many connectors is limited, there may only be limited space within and/or on the connector for the keying features. Accordingly, there may only be a limited number of different configurations of the keying features.
A need remains for an electrical connector having a greater number of different configurations of keying features than at least some known electrical connectors.